Tony Swain

Search instructions

View alphabetical lists of all artists currently featured on the site. Select the initial of the artist's name that you are looking for. Scroll down the list until you find the name, and select it for more information about the artist and his or her work.

Search Tip

Artists are organised by their most commonly-used names. This is usually but not always their surname e.g. Leonardo da Vinci is under L, Van Gogh is under V and Raphael is under R.

Search results

Tony Swain (Northern Irish, born 1967)

Tony Swain’s paintings use abstract and figurative elements to create landscapes which are surreal but familiar. After choosing to paint on newspaper for economic reasons, Swain began to allow sections of the page to show through the paint, using the printed material as a starting point for his work. Taking inspiration from colours, shapes or patterns he finds on the newsprint, Swain is led to create the painting as he goes along, instead of beginning with a fixed idea. He prefers to use The Guardian newspaper, due to the high quality of its photographic images. Swain was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. He studied in Liverpool and at the Glasgow School of Art, and currently lives and works in Glasgow.

Abstract art

Art in which there is no attempt to represent anything existing in the world, particularly used of the 20th century onwards. ‘Abstraction’ refers to the process of making images that may in part derive from the visible world but which are reduced to basic formal elements.

Figurative art

A general term for art that refers to the real, visible world, used more specifically for the representation of the human figure.